In digital imaging systems, color management is the controlled conversion between the color representations of various devices, such as image scanners, digital cameras, monitors, TV screens, film printers, marking devices, offset presses, and corresponding media. One of the primary goals of color management is to obtain a good match across color devices; for example, a video which should appear the same color on a computer LCD monitor, a plasma TV screen, and on a printed frame of video. Mapping of color spaces to the target color points of different target devices is used since many devices do not have the same gamut, or range of colors and brightness, that they are able to produce. For example, some colors outside of a target device's gamut need to be shifted to the inside of the gamut as they otherwise cannot be represented on the output device and would simply be clipped. Color mapping functions are used to adjust the numerical values that are sent to, or received from, different devices so that the perceived color they produce remains consistent. Techniques for dealing with out-of-gamut colors include gamut clipping and gamut compression. In gamut clipping, out-of-gamut colors are mapped to a color on the gamut surface in a way that minimizes degradation of the output, while in-gamut colors are left unaltered. In gamut compression, both in-gamut and out-of-gamut colors are altered to map the entire range of image colors to the printer gamut. Such color mapping is often performed during profile creation. Standardizing run-time custom profiling code becomes difficult to achieve as no single unique gamut mapping strategy is able to be applied to color space which simultaneously satisfies all requirements such as pleasing color, contrast, lightness, chroma, hue, and the like, across all out-of gamut color points.
When a print job has already been produced and a future reprint may be expected, then the color in the future reprint has to be retrieved from the original documents. The initial gamut mapping strategy employed is embedded in the customer's profiling code. The profile may have been produced with different algorithms and technologies. Many strategies are proprietary. Color performance of a given device, both in terms of image quality and computational time, often depends on the gamut mapping employed. There is a need for methods which can accurately retrieve the gamut mapping strategies employed from various initial sources such as the customer's ICC profile, etc.
Accordingly, what is needed in this art are increasingly sophisticated systems and methods for retrieving a gamut mapping to help ensure that original out-of-gamut colors are accurately reproduced during a subsequent mapping.